Installation photograph, Jerrin Wagstaff: American Landscapes, photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA

The relationship of success and freedom is anything but simple. Successful artists, to take one example, often complain that their work sells only so long as they repeat a winning formula, and they may openly pine for their days of obscurity, when they could follow their imaginations freely. Today, however, artistic success often brings a relatively new kind of freedom: the residency. Here a painter, say, is given access to a studio and assistance, a budget for materials, and often a stipend, which equates to free time. All this often comes with minimum requirements, such as that whatever work is produced will be shown at a climax exhibition.

What a residency can do to advance a career may be exemplified by Jerrin Wagstaff’s recent experience. Over the last four years, Wagstaff benefitted from a residency at Modern West Fine Art, during which he introduced his goal of painting something he called an Ultrascape. This he followed with an exhibition at Nox Contemporary, a space that, while not able to offer a residency, was unusual in being privately funded yet non-commercial. Then he capped it with another residency, just now being completed, at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA).

The results, like pretty much everything in art, are open to debate. On the one hand, Wagstaff was able to expand his genre range, as can be seen in the final show now in the AiR (Artist in Residence) Gallery, just off the main space at UMOCA. ON display are two of his very large American Landscapes, the elaboration of which constitute the primary product of his recent labors, and which now number more than twenty. Another work matches them in size and subject matter, but in the form of an animated, presumably computer-generated video that oscillates between extremes, its elements seeming to expand and contract as though breathing. On the opposite wall, six small landscapes offer a genuine alternative to the three big ones, and joining the large works on the side walls are half a dozen collages that superficially resemble the paintings. All together, that makes four radically different means of presentation.

It comes as no surprise that some in the audience will theorize, and have done, that the collages were a source of the Ultrascapes. They were not. They came out of the mental and visual labor of painting the large scenes, and were in fact made possible by the education that work gave his mind and eye. They are a result, rather than the source. They are also products of a fundamental process of dismantling that began when he broke up a stack of discarded, coffee-table art books, and continued as he separated their images into individual passages. Only then could he arrange them in two- and three-dimensional compositions. In contrast, the paintings are built up from scratch, guided solely by Wagstaff’s imagination and craft. The two approaches are mutually exclusive, and, in fact, he says he’s tried it and cannot derive one of his paintings from a collage. (As a footnote, this experience and the lessons drawn from it may help explain Liberty Blake’s uncanny power to dissolve the barrier between collage and painting.)

Wagstaff’s six smaller paintings, from a photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA

Curiously, the most promising work here is not the video, which however successful remains a demonstration due to its novelty and solitary isolation. Rather, it’s the suite of six small landscapes that provide viewers with what seems likely to prove a popular alternative to their larger cousins. Although capable of creating engaging miniature passages, which show up frequently in those large works, Wagstaff has chosen to use the small panels to fully present less complex compositions, wherein his invented effects deliver paradoxically greater power. For now, he prefers to show them in a group, perhaps to prevent their losing what might be called the “narrative complexity” he prefers, due to diminished size. Yet they give every indication of being able to hold their own and even do more as he explores their possibilities.

That brings us to the latest of what he originally styled the Ultrascapes. An unsigned statement attached to the exhibit asserts that the works “straddle the line between real and imagined.” That’s certainly true of the collages and smaller paintings, but in these latest forays the “real,” largely limited to nostalgic rivers running through the lower parts and valedictory skies at the top, seems on the verge of being overcome by the brilliantly colorful, vertical, yet ultimately irreconcilable landscape fragments between. This may well fulfill the artist’s expressed desire to “draw the viewer into the spectacle of the landscape and then turn them loose to reckon with their own experience and desires in a new wilderness.” We can argue with the facts of an art work, but not its intentions, and these surely achieve Wagstaff’s goal of updating art from the era of Albert Bierstadt into the 21st century. One of his fellow artists countered that these paintings are becoming “too digital,” but surely the same can be said about their subject, our nation, which in the light of hacking, data hostage taking, and loss of privacy might also be described as “too digital.”

Installation photograph, Jerrin Wagstaff: American Landscapes, January 26–March 30, 2024, photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA

Yet what intrigues this viewer is the way the sheer complexity of perspectives here creates an illusion of vast space, congruent with the impact of limitless American vistas on European eyes that was the subject of so much 19th century art, only to have it then collapse into a flat surface—followed by its building again. To my way of looking and thinking, this “boom and bust” vision of America captures the infinite promise and equally vast disappointment that has too long characterized our lives, and has finally disillusioned us all, just as we are running out of the resources to enable another round of folly and deceit. This may not be the intention of Jerrin Wagstaff, but when an artist foregoes simple messages in order to inquire after truth, what the art reveals is no longer under anyone’s control.

Jerrin Wagstaff: American Landscapes, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 6

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.